Robot 6

Send us your shelf porn!

Comics are awesome. They’re a great artistic medium. They’re fun to read. They’re fun to collect. They’re fun to blog about. We all know that.

There’s just one problem.

Where are you supposed to keep them all?

That’s the inspiration behind this new feature here at Robot 6. We want to know how you take care of your comics. Do you store them in longboxes or on shelves? In airtight vaults or carelessly strewn about the floor of your apartment? Bag and board or leave them to the elements? Do you organize them in alphabetical order, by publisher or what? You get the idea.

Email me (cmautner at comcast dot net) with pics of your collection and perhaps a few words about how you came about your own unique storage solution and once a week we’ll post the responses we get here, for all to enjoy. Be the envy of all! Show us how inventive you are! Make us curse you for owning that one book we’ve been desperate to locate for umpteen years now!

For this debut post, I thought I’d kick off my sharing my own pics.

A few years back, my wife wanted to have the basement refurbished. At the time, bookshelf space was rapidly becoming untenable. Why not, I thought, slaughter two birds with one stone and have some shelves built into one of the basement walls?

Voila.

There was a time when this was all organized according to genre, author, country of origin, you name it.

Sadly, that didn’t last very long. Shelves are a jumbled mish-mash now. And, as you can see, I’m plumb out of room again.

The kid-friendly shelf. My daughter raids this one constantly.

Here’s how I ended up storing my copy of Kramer’s Ergot 7 and that Walt and Skeezix book.

In my house, Osamu Tezuka gets his own goddamn shelf.

A small bookcase on the other side is where I store all my Comics Journals, miscellaneous magazines and Ignatz floppies.

This is my “to be read” pile. There’s more books under the table.

This is the “books to donate to the library” pile. And no, I can’t play guitar. That’s why it’s in the basement.

“Yeah sure,” I hear you say, “you’ve got the shelves for the graphic novels, but where do you keep the pamphlets?”

Those go in the upstairs closet.

It’s a temporary solution at best. I’m starting to run out of closet space

As for the oversized volumes, you have two options. The easiest is to create a folio shelf and lay them flat on top of one another. The second, more stylish, solution is to purchase an atlas case, which has dedicated shelves below a lectern where a volume can be displayed.

As for your back issue collection, well, you can bundle story arcs together and sell them on eBay (or sell them to your local comics shop as a bundle). If your ethics allow, you can pull scans from the ‘net to replace the paper copies (which you can then recycye or donate).

Also, if one is planning bookcases, either use a sturdy wood to prevent warping, or shorten the length of each shelf. One solution to warping is to nail a small strip of wood to the front of the shelf.

[…] to two awesome shelf porn message board threads that were linked in the comments section of my first post (for some reason the third link kept crashing my browser). I especially like the guy who put his […]